‘Mirror Mirror’ worth a look

Todd Miller | Collegio Reporter

Director Tarsem Singh makes amends for the poor performance of “Immortals” last year with “Mirror Mirror,” a beautiful telling of the fairy tale Snow White.
The story is told by the evil Queen Clementianna (Julia Roberts), who is not necessarily evil; rather she is vain. Snow White’s (Lily Colins) original mother died during childbirth. Snow White’s father, the king, decides to remarry after several years. He married Clementianna before dying, leaving Clementianna to rule the kingdom, and take care of Snow White.

Mirror

Snow White crashes a party, and begins dancing with the young Prince Andrew Alcott (Armie Hammer) whom the queen was trying to seduce. Clementianna proceeds to send Snow White into the woods to be killed. The man she sends to kill Snow White is Brighton (Nathan Lane), who sympathizes with Snow White and releases her to escape. She comes across a band of seven dwarf thieves while fleeing. Although they are skeptical of Snow White, the group eventually bands together to take down the queen.
The nice thing about the movie is that the story is usually geared toward children, but it does well to entertain adults. Although the film is saturated with the soft light and bright colors of a child’s fairy tale, it also balanced this out with more realistic settings when they were called for it. It was a fairy tale when needed, and a Grimm fairy tale when needed.
Since the film is aimed toward children, it is full of jokes and keeps the humor going. However, I feel the humor was not always appropriate to the mood of the scene. The film did give me a couple of laughs, but there were times when the film would put jokes in more serious scenes, which breaks the mood. In addition, some of the story elements simply weren’t needed and they tried to drop emotional baggage onto the audience.
Many scenes in the movie are beautiful even when they’re ugly. “Mirror Mirror” is a great film just to look at most of the time. The costuming was well done, too, even when it was intentionally exaggerated for the sake of humor. Even if the film isn’t worth watching, it is worth looking at.
The plot itself is a standard fairy tale. There were hardly any surprises, and you’re just waiting for them to get to the happy ending before the credits. It’s not the strongest plotline, but it is good enough if you don’t expect anything revolutionary.
“Mirror Mirror” is a decent film, and is definitely worth seeing if you have kids because they’re sure to enjoy it. It has a few small things dragging it down, but it was enjoyable. This was not the film I thought it was going to be. It seems there will be a completely different retelling of Snow White later this year, which looks like a film worth seeing.